Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright's new report, Taonga of an Island Nation: Saving New Zealand's Birds, released last week, highlighted the "tragic" state of many native birds.

And the picture was no more encouraging in Northland, according to Northland conservation advocate for Forest & Bird, Dean Baigent-Mercer.​"A regional priority needs to be turning around the state of the collapsing native forests across the North, including the aerial use of 1080, expanding pest control along coastlines, including dog control on beaches, and resuscitating wetlands," he said.

"These three activities are key to the return of Northland's most threatened native birds. This is all entirely possible within our lifetimes, but we must take action quickly."

Mr Baigent-Mercer said that the report named the eight native birds that were in the most serious trouble in Tai Tokerau.

Northland's small population of the North Island kokako had been saved from extinction by intensive use of 1080 and trapping over 20 years.

There were now two small populations, at Mataraua/Waima and Puketi (which were re-introduced). Kokako were extremely sensitive to rats, stoats and possums, and could not expand and survive beyond current areas of best-quality pest control.

The tuturiwhatu/New Zealand dotterel could be seen at Waitangi and Paihia (and elsewhere, including Ahipara). They nested on islands and several beaches around Northland, but eggs and chicks were at risk from predators, vehicles, gulls and dogs.

Once common, there were now fewer than 2000 birds nationally, most in Northland.

The matuku hurepo/Australasian bittern was the closest of all Northland's native birds to extinction. With fewer than 900 nationally, bitterns were now classed as critically endangered. Large, secretive birds, a pair needed eight hectares of wetland as their feeding territory.

The continued destruction of wetlands for farming and mining for swamp kauri was further constricting their habitat, pushing them closer to extinction. Like other birds, they benefited from good pest control.

The matata/fern bird was a secretive wetland bird with a call that sounded like electric shocks. The way they scuttled among plants made them appear more like a rodent than a bird, but the destruction of wetlands had wiped out most of their habitat. They benefited from good pest control.

The weka remained in only three wild populations in the North Island. Those around Russell and Opua are the only ones north of Auckland, introduced via a Forest & Bird project in the 1990s.

They needed a continuous corridor of pest control to expand into Russell State Forest, which also needed pest control. Weka could be re-introduced to other areas in the future, but the Russell population probably needed new birds from elsewhere to expand their genetic diversity.

Pest animals drove Northland's mainland kaka to extinction in the 1970s/80s. They were now flying over offshore islands, but most large Northland native forests were collapsing. If the populations of introduced pests were kept low enough, the cheeky native parrot would re-establish and could become common.

Almost all the titi pounamu/rifleman's relatives were extinct. The tiny bird's only mainland population north of the Waikato is on Warawara, on the north side of the Hokianga Harbour. They needed consistent, high-quality pest control to survive and expand.

The work that Te Rarawa hapu, Reconnecting Northland, DOC and the NRC had put into recent pest control work was turning around the collapse of that native forest, and on-going work would allow the rifleman to spread and other native bird species, wiped out by predation, to be returned.​Pycroft's petrel bred on islands off Whangaroa, but rats were still a problem. Removing rats from other islands had seen an 80 per cent increase in chick survival. They and other seabirds would return to areas along Northland's coasts, and possibly to the forests that used to be home to millions of seabirds that feed at sea.